


a morning filled with 400 billion suns

by subducting



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Mini Fic, One Shot, The Doctor is an eldritch being, may require a tiny bit of scientific knowledge, short fic, timelords can see in many wavelengths au, u ever just think about space at three am and c r y
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:28:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25984384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subducting/pseuds/subducting
Summary: "a still more glorious dawn awaits. not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. a morning filled with 400 billion suns: the rising of the milky way"Carl Sagan
Relationships: the doctor/science
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	a morning filled with 400 billion suns

**Author's Note:**

> The premise of this fic is that the Doctor can see in many different wavelengths. If that doesn't make sense, I am basically giving her the ability to see kinds of radiation that are invisible to human eyes. For an idea of what she sees, please visit this web page http://www.chromoscope.net/

There’s a place she goes when she hurts.

It’s about 300 parsecs from Earth, a hundred thousand light-years. The light arriving there in the Earth year of 2020 began its journey when humanity was still in its infancy- history was just getting its start.

The Doctor, standing on the shores of a darkened ocean, straining her eyes in the pre-dawn, won't see the Earth in visible wavelengths. If it were another hundred thousand years in the future, she may be able to make out the faint glimmer of radio communications flickering from the sun, if she squints. But for now she’s happy to take this view.

It isn’t a blazing, golden Earth dawn of a single star. Instead, slowly, a great wisp of gas and dust and light begins to emerge over the dark horizon of the desolate little rock. It has liquid oceans by benefit of a dim red star nearby but it’s almost airless, too tiny to hold very much of an atmosphere, and there isn’t any barrier to the cosmos.

Shivering, white cloudy light begins to pick out the languid ripples of the unnaturally still ocean as more of the milky way comes into view. The Doctor is stood within the TARDIS’ shields, watching for hours as the human’s home galaxy slowly takes over the entire sky.

  
This out of the way little spot will likely never become a tourist destination. Radiation bathes it’s airless surface, and the temperature is sub zero. The oceans are barren of any kind of life- super saline and thus able to stay liquid even in such icy conditions, but totally inhospitable. But as the galaxy climbs serenely over the horizon and takes it’s post in the sky she steps from the safety of the TARDIS’ shields into the black.

The cold sinks through her coat to her hearts instantly, the deadly radiation harmless to her. Whatever she is, she passed on more than regeneration to the Shobogans. She subtly adjusts her eyes, switching from the delicate frothed milk hues of visible wavelengths to infra-red, and strands of hydrogen gas many lightyears long appear, ballooning upwards from the centre of the galaxy like wisps from a coffee. Stars, hidden in visible light by the halo of pearlescent gray gas suddenly bloom into sight, nestled within their stellar nurseries of glowing, super-heated gas.

She descends the wavelengths, watching the intergalactic medium shimmer like a heat haze between her and the milky way in microwave. Radio wavelengths show electrons being sped around the galaxy, swept up in enormous magnetic fields or being repelled by protons in ionised gas. The star forming regions in the spiral arms glows and, at the 21cm wavelength atomic hydrogen lights up, showing vast oceans of interstellar medium coalescing into cool and warm pools.

She shifts back towards visible light, through the burning heat glow of infrared to ultraviolet, picking out energetic young stars in nebulae that light the surrounding clouds of dust. Microwaves start with shadows of cold gas that hide the frantic radiation of fantastically warm interstellar medium like lightning behind clouds, and the terrifyingly powerful jets from the central black hole only grow brighter as she nears the edges of even her vision in gamma ray wavelengths, as the rest of the galaxy dims. The only bright spots in these wavelengths are the most violent parts of the galaxy, pulsars and magnetars spinning and flickering as they whirl like children’s toys, and black holes annihilating matter with such enormous violence it releases the highest energy radiation in existence.

The Doctor strays among the wavelengths for a while, the many views of the Milky Way filling her eyes. She sees them as colours indescribable to humans, her mind creating new fantastical hues to distinguish the myriad of different kinds of radiation raining down on her from the universe- all of it the same, simply photons, nothing more.

It is not the view from Gallifrey, of the mighty timelords, watching the insignificant whirling of the lesser civilisations beneath their lofty perch amongst the stars. She is dwarfed by the galaxy, silhouetted below it, unimaginably small as it rises into the tiny sky on a lonely little planetoid. Her lungs begin to ache but she doesn’t return to the TARDIS, taking in every last moment of the galaxy rising, now in visible light, so cold and breathless and alone on the silent world she can imagine she’s among the stars.

The pain is still unbearable when she collapses against the door of the TARDIS, recovering her breath. But she has to remind herself that for all she is worn from the constant running, her path has one hell of a view.

**Author's Note:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
> 
> https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/milkyway2.html
> 
> sometimes you just need to wax lyrical about science through the doctor


End file.
